Edward Lee Howard, 50, Spy Who Escaped to Soviet Haven

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

Published: July 23, 2002

MOSCOW, July 22—
Edward Lee Howard, the former C.I.A. agent who defected to the Soviet Union in the mid-1980's after a disappearing act in the New Mexico desert, has died. He was 50.

''The embassy has received reports that Edward Lee Howard died on July 12th,'' said Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, confirming his death. Another official said the department had confirmed the death with Mr. Howard's next of kin.

Mr. Howard's death remains as mysterious as his life. The Washington Post said he died of a broken neck in an accident at his dacha. But in a report by RIA-Novosti, the Russian government's news service, an unnamed Russian foreign intelligence officer, who said he knew Mr. Howard, denied ''this version of Howard's death,'' but gave no further details.

''He is indeed dead,'' Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, the former K.G.B. chief, said in a phone interview. Mr. Kryuchkov, who was imprisoned as one of the leaders of a coup against Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1991 but who is now free, said he had received a call informing him of the death, but refused to give more information.

Mr. Howard fled the United States from the New Mexico desert in 1985. In an account by David Wise in an article in The New York Times Magazine on Nov. 2, 1986, he said that Mary Howard helped her husband escape by driving home from the desert with a dummy made of clothes and a wig stand in the front seat, fooling the agent watching them. He wrote that Mrs. Howard further aided her husband by playing a tape recording of his voice over their telephone to deceive F.B.I. agents who were tapping the phone.

Mrs. Howard was not charged in connection with her husband's escape. She is said to be living in the United States, but her whereabouts are not publicly known.

Mr. Howard turned up in Moscow the following year and was granted political asylum on Aug. 7, 1986.

He had been forced to resign from the C.I.A. in 1983 after failing a polygraph test about petty theft and drug use. At the time, he had been in training to operate in Moscow as a team with his wife.

Mr. Howard was reported to have sold information to Soviet agents in Austria in 1984. The American authorities put him under surveillance after receiving information from Vitaly Yurchenko, a K.G.B. deputy chief who defected to the United States in 1985, that appeared to incriminate Mr. Howard.

Mr. Howard's defection came during a rash of espionage incidents. It was an embarrassment for the C.I.A. and helped to damage the American spy network in the Soviet Union.

A number of American diplomats were expelled from the Soviet Union as a result of information provided by Mr. Howard. Mr. Wise, author of ''The Spy Who Got Away'' (Random House), a 1988 book about Mr. Howard, said in an interview that the information also resulted in the execution of Adolf Tolkachev, a Soviet defense researcher, a charge Mr. Howard denied.

''He was a very important spy,'' said Mr. Wise, who interviewed Mr. Howard extensively. ''He was the first C.I.A. defector and maybe the only one we know of who left through the K.G.B. Most of the traffic has been in the other direction.''

While admitting some contact with the K.G.B., Mr. Howard, who released his own memoirs -- ghost-written by Richard Cote -- in 1995 (''Safe House: The Compelling Memoirs of the Only C.I.A. Spy to Seek Asylum in Russia,'' National Press Books) denied he was guilty of full-fledged informing.

In Russia, Mr. Howard was given an apartment in Moscow and a dacha in the prestigious community of Zhukovka. He lived a ''rather dull life of an ex-spy,'' which in those days included monthly allowances and a poorly hidden new identity, said Pavel Felgenhauer, a journalist and independent military analyst.

But there were problems. Even before he came to Russia, Mr. Howard had a severe drinking problem, said Mr. Wise.

His life passed in longing for his wife and his son, Lee, who was born in March 1983. They were allowed occasional visits to Russia. Mr. Howard wrote that he went to the United States to visit them after he defected, a claim Mr. Wise dismissed.

Though Mr. Howard seems to have been valued by the Soviet authorities, his information appears to have been less important than that of Aldrich H. Ames, who was arrested in 1994 for espionage after having identified many American spies to the Soviets.

Mark Kramer, a Russian specialist at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard, concluded that Mr. Howard played a bigger role deflecting attention from Mr. Ames than in his own spying. Mr. Howard ''did do some damage on his own, but it was that inadvertent contribution that was especially important,'' he added.